Mitch,
This is good feedback. We'll look to add a Process Optimization Academy session specifically on working with Requests.
A couple of high level pieces of guidance when working with process optimization and request. First is if you are mining at the Request record level its best to isolate them in some way. Perhaps isolate them to a certain category of requests. For example, maybe mine just IT Server requests or a certain type of software requests. Same concept at the SC task level, you may want to mine a specific task or tasks associated to certain requested item.
Some common findings at both request and task levels are long approval times or multiple approvals steps in which we may be able to save time by eliminating one or more of the approval steps.
We've also seen examples wrongly categorized or assigned tasks.
If you are outsourcing the fulfillment of the same task to different groups or even vendors, using breakdowns to analyze and compare performance is a common area of interest.
This white paper details some workflows we have used Process Optimization against here at ServiceNow. Two of them are request based. We've also published a book of inefficiencies. Some of the overall process examples align to request and might provide some ideas.
Here is one of the examples:
We've made some enhancements in Tokyo that will help when analyzing requests, specifically the new multidimensional mining. If you are interested check out this recording we walk through setting up a request process.
Hope this information is helpful. If you want to talk to have a conversation, reach out to your account team and we can schedule some time.
